Album Review: The Lord Is My German Shepherd (Time For Walkies)

Few post-punk albums from New Zealand bands will be more anticipated this year than Ringlets’ second offering The Lord is My German Shepherd (Time for Walkies) released this week by Flying Nun and Leather Jacket Records. Ringlets is Leith Towers (vocals), Arabella Poulson (bass and vocals), Arlo Grey (drums) and László Reynolds (guitar). The Lord follows the Auckland band’s 2022 rave-reviewed debut Ringlets and last year’s brilliant stand-alone teaser single New Life.  Listeners found them “like Tool but in cardigans,” the band told Flying Nun. To NZ Musician, Reynolds described their sound as aggressive guitar riffing and driving rhythms, which were derived from The Jesus Lizard and Minutemen. The band joins the likes of Black Flag for having supported formative punk giants The Damned. Rolling Stone said, “Ringlets really are one of the most exciting bands Auckland has produced in a long time.”

No pressure then, ha ha.

If you didn’t know any of this, the first minutes of The Lord’s opening might strike you as anything but post-punk. Posh Girl Holds A Whip’s first three minutes are strumming and percussive guitars, mandolins, with a Celtic or eastern European influenced rapid-fire 1-2 rhythm – sounding like a new age folk song. And then the lyrics come in and there’s – what? – a woman buying whips and chains. She is spanking someone. There’s ecstasy, marks left on a lovers’ naked skin. Somehow, a bridle appears and there’s a mule metaphor. “Private education just couldn’t iron our kinks and leathery hides,” Towers sings. Almost as soon as they started, the lyrics fall away and we’re left with an evolving soundscape – no more folk now, as the scene changes in an instant. Now there’s Reynolds playing an arpeggio guitar piece, Poulson is playing bass high up the neck, and a dense wall of a mellotron-like sound and layered guitars takes over (like a Deafheaven interlude), somehow changing the song into a chiming meditation. It’s in anticipation, of course, for the third and conclusive part of the song, a final 45 seconds of crunching guitar riffology and thundering drums.

So, one song down and it’s as if we’ve already had three great tracks.

It’s a pattern set to be established – that there is no pattern here. The latest single I Was On That Roof Once follows and is also characterised by dense and quick-fire lines from Towers, and music in multiple parts. Half an Idiot begins as a simmering ballad but ends as a terrifying punk attack on a hospital, screamed and backed by raucous guitar, “Where someone is learning to talk again / If they can find those words / They’ll tell you the food is terrible!”  On Sucking on a Surly Pout Poulson takes the lead vocals, in an almost hilariously strange piece of foot stomping bass and drums with fuzz guitar, odd time signatures, bars cut short and – yeah – eventually, accordions. It’s so brilliantly done it had me prancing about like a fool. For The Lord’s closing tracks, Hit the Frog and This Year’s Hottest Movie, Towers has a frog post on LinkedIn and retinas detaching from watching too many Reels.

The inventiveness, dynamism and humour here reminds me of the controlled mania of early Back Country, New Road when Isaac Woods fronted the band with flamboyance and wry, cynical observation. There’s something of that here. There’s also a taste of the unpredictable folk-prog alchemy of Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci, the Welsh eclectics who found marginal fame in the 1990s but were later regarded as brilliant.

Ringlets’ performances here are certainly very accomplished, and there’s more invention in this single record than most successful bands could manage across a whole career. Somehow, they make the multifarious coherent, turn a crowd of ideas into an assembly – and whatever it is, it demands repeat listening.

This is the sort of music we should be making and celebrating. Go on Bandcamp and buy it. Tell radio stations to play it. Ask Ringlets to go on tour and go see them.